Gravity raises $30.5M to place ads in ChatGPT, and now it's targeting the bots themselves

Gravity Raises $30.5M to Scale AI Chatbot Advertising

Adtech startup Gravity has closed a $30.5 million Series A funding round co-led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Committed Capital, bringing its total funding to $38.5 million. The company operates a full-stack ad platform designed specifically for AI chatbots and agents—a demand-side platform for advertisers, a supply-side platform for app developers, and an exchange that connects the two.

Gravity's clients already include major brands like Best Buy, Target, Vercel, and MongoDB, and text-based ads served by its system appear inside ChatGPT, Codebuff, EcoGPT, and several other AI assistants. The startup is betting that owning the entire transaction pipeline will give it an edge as AI interfaces become a new channel for reaching consumers.

The more provocative announcement, however, is Gravity's trial of 'agent-to-agent' advertising—ads that are never seen by human eyes. Advertisers supply product catalogues with features and promotions, and when an AI shopping agent searches a category, it receives a ranked list of relevant offers to enrich its buying decision. Gravity plans to integrate direct payment capability so an agent can complete a purchase once a user approves. The concept reflects an advertising market that WPP Media forecasts will reach $100 billion globally by 2030.

OpenAI is moving quickly on its own. ChatGPT switched to a cost-per-click ad model in April and is building a platform with partners like Adobe, StackAdapt, and Criteo, and its annualised ad revenue reportedly crossed $100 million within two months of launching ads. Gravity says it can differentiate by serving multiple AI platforms and controlling the full tech stack, aiming to build network effects that improve ad relevance with every placement.

The Race to Own AI Advertising: Gravity vs. OpenAI and the Agent-to-Agent Frontier

Where Gravity Stands Against OpenAI's Ad Ambitions

Gravity's immediate challenge is that the largest AI assistant it works with—ChatGPT—is actively building its own competing ad infrastructure. OpenAI's move to cost-per-click and partnerships with established adtech players suggest it aims to capture a significant share of the ad revenue its platform generates. For Gravity, being the ad layer inside ChatGPT today does not guarantee permanence; it risks being side-lined as OpenAI's own platform matures.

The startup's defence is its multi-platform, full-stack strategy. By working across several AI apps and controlling both the buy and sell sides, Gravity believes it can offer advertisers reach beyond any single assistant's walled garden. That theory works only if it can attract enough inventory and advertiser demand to create a liquid marketplace before larger competitors lock in exclusive deals.

Agent-to-Agent Ads: A New Ad Medium Without Eyeballs

The agent-to-agent pilot signals a deeper shift. In a world where AI agents shop, book, and compare on behalf of users, the traditional ad model—designed to capture human attention—becomes less effective. Gravity's approach turns ads into structured data: a product catalogue entry that an agent evaluates based on relevance, not creative flash. If agents become the primary purchasing interface, the companies that control the data feeds that inform those agents could hold powerful commercial positions.

There are open questions, however. The real-world effectiveness of agent-to-agent advertising depends on how many shopping agents enter the ecosystem, whether they are permitted to use advertising-driven recommendations, and how users and regulators react to bots being influenced by paid placements. For now, the format exists only in testing.

Can an Independent Adtech Build Network Effects in AI Search?

Founder Zach Oldham argues that owning both sides of the transaction makes the network smarter with every placement—a classic adtech play. The challenge is scale. Google already runs the world's largest ad business with deep AI capabilities and massive data advantages. A startup with $38.5 million in total funding entering a market projected at $100 billion must move fast to build bilateral scale—enough advertisers to attract AI app developers, and enough developer inventory to attract advertisers.

If Gravity can establish itself as the default neutral layer for AI chatbot ads before the largest AI platforms build their own walled gardens, it could carve out a meaningful position. The next 18-24 months will reveal whether that window is real.

What Gravity's Funding and Agent-to-Agent Pilot Mean for the Ad Industry

• For advertisers: Agent-to-agent advertising is a nascent channel; brands should monitor pilot results and consider how their product data can be structured for machine-to-machine recommendation. Early movers with well-formatted catalogues may gain positioning advantages if the format scales.
• For AI app developers: Gravity's supply-side platform offers a potential monetisation lever, but developers should weigh the risk of locking into a single adtech partner as larger platforms like OpenAI build their own solutions.
• For competitors: Gravity's full-stack, multi-assistant approach is a direct counter-position to platform-specific ad models. Watch whether OpenAI or other major AI players respond with exclusive ad partnerships that could limit Gravity's inventory access.
• For the adtech ecosystem: The emergence of agent-to-agent advertising could shift value from creative and attention-driven metrics to structured data quality and trustworthiness of product information. Incumbents that rely on human-centric display or search ads may need to prepare for a world where ads are consumed by algorithms, not people.